MÉSZÁROS, István. The Work of Sartre

7/22/2019 MSZROS, Istvn. The Work of Sartre

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T W S


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B Y T H E S A M E A U T H O R

Satire and Reality,Szpirodalmi Knyvkiad, Budapest 1955La rivolta degli intellettuali in Ungheria,Einaudi 1958

Attila Jzsef e larte moderna,Lerici 1964

Marxs Theory of Alienation,Merlin Press 1970

The Necessity of Social Control,Merlin Press 1971

Aspects of History and Class Consciousness(ed.), Routledge 1971

Lukcss Concept of Dialectic,Merlin Press 1972

Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness: The Work of

Renato Constantino (ed.), Merlin Press 1978

The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom,Harvester Wheatsheaf 1979Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science,Harvester Wheatsheaf 1986

The Power of Ideology,Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989

Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition,Merlin Press 1995

Lalternativa alla societ del capitale: Socialismo o barbarie,

Punto Rosso, 2000

Socialism or Barbarism: From the American Century to the Crossroads,

Monthly Review Press, 2001

A educao para alm do capital, Boitempo Editorial 2005

O desao e o fardo do tempo histrico, Boitempo Editorial 2007

The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time,Monthly Review Press 2008

A crise estrutural do capital,Boitempo Editorial, 2009

The Structural Crisis of Capital,Monthly Review Press, 2009

Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness:Vol. 1, The Social Determination of Method, Monthly Review Press 2010

Vol. 2, The Dialectic of Structure and History,Monthly Review Press 2011


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The Work of SartreSearch for Freedom and the Challenge of History

by ISTVN MSZROS

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

New York


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Copyright 2012 by Istvn Mszros

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mszros, Istvn, 1930-

The work of Sartre : search for freedom and the challenge of history / by

Istvn Mszros. [Expanded ed.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pp. 331, 357) and index.

ISBN 978-1-58367-292-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-58367-293-8

(cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980. I. Title.

B2430.S34M42 2012

194dc23

2012026841

Monthly Review Press

146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W

New York, New York 10001

www.monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1
http://www.monthlyreview.org/http://www.monthlyreview.org/


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C

Preface to the Expanded Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Introduction to the First Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

P A R T O N E

The Unity of Life and Work: Outline of Sartres Development

1The Writer and His Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

2Philosophy, Literature and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473From The Legend of Truth to a True Legend: Phases of Sartres Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

P A R T T W O

Search for Freedom

4Search For the Individual: The Early Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 915Freedom and Passion: The World ofBeing and Nothingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143A Note onBeing and Nothingness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217


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P A R T T H R E E

The Challenge of History

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2256Material and Formal Structures of History: Critique of Sartres Conception of Dialectical Reason and Historical Totalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2397Lvy-Strauss Against Sartre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2798The Role of Scarcity in Historical Conceptions . . . . . . . . . . . 295

9The Missing Dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375


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F D


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A MAN CARRIES A WHOLE EPOCH WITHIN HIM,JUST AS A WAV E CARRIES THE WHOLE OF THE SEA.

The Purposes of Writing

I DEPEND O NLY ON THOSE WHO DEPEND ONLY ON GOD,

AND I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD. TRY AND SORT THIS OUT!

Words

IT IS NOT MY FAULT IF REALITY IS MARXIST.

Sartre Quoting Che Guevara

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IS :

WHAT HAVE YOU MADE OF YOUR LIFE ?La Question


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P E E

IN APRIL 1 992 THE Q UARTERLY JOURNAL Radical Philosophyin an interviewpublished in its Number 62asked me the question: You met Sartre in1957. Why did you decide to write a book about him?

This was my answer:

I always felt that Marxists owed a great deal to Sartre because we live in anage in which the power of capital is overbearing, where, signicantly, theresounding platitude of politicians is that there is no alternative, whetheryou think of Mrs Thatcher, or also of Gorbachev, who endlessly repeatedthe same until he had to nd out, like Mrs Thatcher, that after all there hadto be an alternative to both of them. But it goes on and on, and if you lookaround and think of how both Conservative and Labour politicians talk,they always talk about there is no alternative, and the underlying pressuresare felt everywhere.

Sartre was a man who always preached the diametrical opposite: there

is an alternative, there must be an alternative; you as an individual have torebel against this power, this monstrous power of capital. Marxists on thewhole failed to voice that side. I dont say that you have to become thereforean existentialist in order to face it, but there is no one in the last fty yearsof philosophy and literature who tried to hammer it home with such single-mindedness and determination as Sartre did: the necessity that there has tobe a rebellion against the wisdom of there is no alternative and there must


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10 THE WO RK OF SARTR E

be an individual participation in it. I dont embrace Sartres philosophicalideas but I fully share the aim. How you realize that aim is up to you in the

context of your own approach; but the aim is something without which wewont get anywhere.Sartre today in France is a very embarrassing person even to mention.

Why? Because what happened is that in the name of privatism andindividualism they have totally sold out to the powers of repression, acapitulation to the forces of there is no alternative, and that is why Sartreis a terrible reminder. When you also look into the background of the peoplewe are talking about, post-modernists of a great variety, they very often

were politically engaged people. But their engagement was skin-deep. Someof these people, around 1968, were more Maoist than the extreme Maoistsin China, and now they have embraced the right in a most enthusiasticway; or they were in the French Socialism or Barbarism group and havebecome the peddlers of the most stupid platitudes of post-modernity.

What these people have lost is their frame of reference. In Franceintellectual life used to be dominated in one way or another by the

Communist Party. That goes also for Sartre who tried criticizing it fromoutside and pushing it in a direction which he advocated until he had tocome to the conclusion that work in collaboration with the CommunistParty is both necessary and impossible; which is a terrible, bitter dilemma.He said that at the time of the Algerian war when the role of the CommunistParty was absolutely disgraceful. Necessary because you need a movementto oppose the repressive force of the state; and impossible, because look

what that movement is like.What happened, of course, was the disintegration of the FrenchCommunist Party like several other parties of the Third International in thelast two decades. And with the sinking of that big ship in relation to whichthe French intellectuals for a long time dened themselves in one way oranother, here are these intellectuals left behind: the ship has disappearedand they nd themselves in their self-inated rubber dinghies throwing littledarts at each other. Not a very reassuring sight: and they are not going to

get out of it by simply fantasizing about some individuality which doesntexist; because true individuality is inconceivable without a community withwhich you relate yourself and dene yourself.

In this sense the relevance of Sartres uncompromising message about thenecessary alternative to there is no alternative is greater today than everbefore. That is so even if Sartres passionate advocacy could be spelled out,


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PRE FACE TO THE EXPAND ED E DITIO N 11

right from his early writings onwards, only in the form of a radical negationof the existent.

Already way back in 1939, in his beautiful essay on the novel by Faulkner,The Sound and the Fury, Sartre insisted that Faulkners despair precedes hismetaphysics: for him, as for us all, the future is barred.Everything we see, every-thing we live through, incites us to say: It cannot last, and meanwhile changeisnt even conceivable except in the form of a cataclysm. We live in an epochofimpossible revolutions, and Faulkner employs his extraordinary artistry todescribe this world which is dying of old age, and our suffocation. I love his artand I dont believe in his metaphysics: a barred future is still a future.

The stubborn determination with which Sartre could carry on defyingall odds against those who were (and continue to be) pressing for a radicalchange remains exemplary also in our age. For the stakes are getting higherall the time. At this critical juncture of history they amount to nothing lessthan threatening the very survival of humanity. Threatening it in a make orbreak historical epoch when the future seems to be fatefully barred by capi-tals deepening structural crisis and by the all too obvious power of wanton

destruction emanating from it against the necessary revolutionary transfor-mation and emancipation.

However, it is highly signicant that Sartre did not stop at focussingsimply on the grave facticity of the barred future. His work is most relevantprecisely because he could stress even in his darkest and most pessimisticmoments that a barred future is still a future, underlining at the sametime every individuals direct responsibility to face up to the corresponding

historical challenge. That is the reason why he had to becomein a worldof shabby compromises and evasions pursued as a blindly self-imposedresponse to the worsening crisisan embarrassing reminder and a dis-turbing presence.

More than fty years ago, in 1958, in an article entitled Of rats andmen, Sartre expressed in a most inventive way his concern about the appar-ently prohibitive magnitude of the task to be faced. This is how he had putit at the time:

I remember seeing a puppy after the partial removal of the cerebellum. . . .He pondered before going around an object, requiring a great deal of timeand thought to accomplish movements to which he had previously paid noattention. In the language of the time, we said that the cortex had assumed forhim certain functions of the lower regions. He was an intellectual dog. . . . heeither had to die or reinvent the dog.


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So we othersrats without cerebellawe are also so made that we musteither die or reinvent man.. . . without us, the fabrication would take place

in the dark, by tinkering and patching, if we, the debrained, were not thereto repeat constantly that we must work according toprinciples,that it is nota matter of mending,but of measuring and constructing, and nally, thatmankind will be the concrete universal, or that it will not be.

Could it be true that the partially debrained dog reinvented the dog asan intellectual dog, in order not to die? The simple fact is that it is quiteimmaterial whether the puppy really succeeded in reinventing the dog. The

issue at stake is not the literal truth (or not) of the described situation butsomething incomparably more fundamental than that. It is the same vitaltruth which indelibly affects the life of all human beings in their unavoidablehistorical setting; the life of every one of them no less than the vision of theirdeeply committed poets and philosophers who try to render explicit theshared concerns of their time in tune with the changing historical predica-ment of humankind. This non-literal truth is the same which was high-

lighted in the rst half of the nineteenth century by the great poetic geniusof Hungary, Sndor Pet, when at the time of celebrating the appearanceof the rst railways all over Europe he asked and answered his fundamentalquestion in this way:

Why did you not built railways before? Did you not have enough iron?

Break and melt down all your shackles, You shall have plenty of iron!

Pets truth is the same as Sartres vital existential belief concerning thesurvival of humanity. Only the circumstances have changed. They share theirmeaning also in the sense that the necessary reinvention of man whichcannot be accomplished, as Sartre rightly says, by tinkering/patching and

mending in the dark but only by constructing guided byprinciplesis quiteimpossible without breaking and melting down all our shackles. Literallyas well as in the broadest gurative sense. And that makes imperative therevolutionary opening up of the barred future before it becomes too late.This is why the Sartrean message, going to the roots of our problems, is evenmore relevant today than in the past.


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PRE FACE TO THE EXPAND ED E DITIO N 13

IN 1979, WHEN THE WORK OF SARTRE: SEARCH FOR FREEDOM was rstpublished in the Harvester Philosophy Now series, edited by my very

dear friend Roy Edgley, the book was meant to be followed by an analysis ofSartres conception of history in a second volume, under the subtitle of TheChallenge of History. Other work intervened to delay the completion of thisproject and modify some of its originally intended details. The complicatedproblems involved in it had to be explored in their most comprehensivesettingattempted especially in my books on The Power of Ideology andBeyond Capital, as well as in the recently published two volumes of SocialStructure and Forms of Consciousnessincluding the positive dimension ofthe necessary alternative that had to remain to the end missing from Sartresradical negation of the existent. Without undertaking such complementarywork in its required overall framework, Sartres passionate outcry aboutthe paralyzing burden of impossible revolutionswhich marked his nalyears with unredeemable pessimismcould not be put in its historicallychallengeable proper perspective.

At the time of publishing the rst edition of this book to which an exten-

sive Part Three is now added, a reviewer wrote that Mszross work is aphilosophical study . . . It not only provides a telling critique of Sartre, butsituates him in relation to twentieth century thought. Its approach to Sartrecomprehends all his manifestations novelist, playwright, philosopher, andpoliticianand does justice to this most extraordinary man. While neversharing Sartres openly confessed or implied pessimism about the feasiblesolutions, the general orientation and spirit of the now completed project is

the same as originally intended. It is to put into relief, against diametricallyopposed but equally tendentious misrepresentations, not only the insolubledilemmas and antinomies of Sartres radical negation, as formulated fromthe perspective of his class against which he rebelled with the greatest integ-rity, but also their representative value and relative historical validity for thewhole of our critical epoch. So as to do justice to this most extraordinaryman: our real comrade in arms.


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I

Without falling into manicheism, one ought to intensify intransigence.

At the extreme limit any Left positionin the measure that it is contraryto what they try to inculcate to the whole of societyis found to bescandalous. This does not mean that one should look for scandalthat would be absurd and inefficaciousbut that one should not dreadit: it has to come, if the position taken is right, as a side-effect, as a sign,as a natural sanction against Left attitude.1

J EAN- PAUL SART R E IS A MAN WHO L IVE D half his life in the limelight ofextreme notoriety. An intellectual who already in 1945 had to protestagainst attempts aimed at institutionalizing the writer, turning his worksinto national goods, for which he had to exclaim: it is not pleasant to betreated in ones lifetime as a public monument.2

What must be equally unpleasant is to be constantly subjected to abuse.And the fact is that no writer in his lifetime has been the target of so many

attacks, from the most varied and rather powerful quarters, as Jean-PaulSartre.

What are the reasons? How should we approach the work of this man,our contemporary?


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IN OCTOBER 1960 A MASS DEMONSTRATION of war veterans on the Champs-Elyses marches to the slogan: Shoot Sartre. In the same period, Paris-Matchcarries an editorial with the title: Sartre, civil war machine.

Some of the demonstrators or readers ofParis-Match mean business: hisat is bombed on 19 July 1961, and again, a few months later, on 7 January1962. For how could one leave in peace a civil war machine?

Nor is October 1960 the rst time he is called a war machine. In June1945that time from the opposite side of the barricadehe is attacked as

manufacturer of war machine against marxism.3The irony of it all. Is itSartre who has changed so much? Or is it, perhaps, that this passionateadvocate of every individuals full responsibility in the midst of the forcesof impersonal institutionalization is deemed irrecoverable and thus, bya curious logic, must be declared to be an alien body, a machineindeeda mythical war machine at that? How revealing is the shared, bombasticimagery? Why is it that powerful institutions in their confrontations with sol-

itary individuals represent the relation of forces upside down and denouncethe voice of dissent as sinister sounds of a powerful enemys war machine?In 1948 no less a power than the Soviet Government takes an official

stand against Sartre: its diplomatic representatives in Helsinki try to pres-surize the Finnish Government to forbid the performance of Sartres play:Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands). It is supposed to be hostile propagandaagainst the USSRnothing less, nothing more!

Who is this man, this machine de guerre, armed with such mythicalpowers? During the war, when Churchill tried to back his own arguments bymaking references to the Pope, Stalin remarked with a sense of realism andcandid cynicism: How many Divisions, did you say, the Pope had? Did theaging Stalin think, in 1948, that Sartre was about to launch an invasion, withmany more Divisions at his disposal than the Pope could ever dream about?

And while we are talking about the Pope, we should recall that in thesame year, on 30 October 1948, a special decree of the Holy Office puts

the whole of Sartres work on the Index. It is in the spirit of this Indexthat sixteen years later, in October 1964, on the occasion of Sartres rejec-tion of the Nobel Prize, the gentle Gabriel Marcel, spokesman of Christianexistentialism, thunders against him in a very non-Christian voice, callinghim inveterate denigrator, systematic blasphemist, man of perniciousand poisonous views, patented corrupter of youth, grave-digger of theWest.4Thus the decree of the Holy Office under the reign of Pope Pius


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INTR OD UCTION 17

XIIthe same man who blessed Hitlers arms in their Holy Crusadebecomes the license to open the oodgates of unholy venom, in the name of

Christianity and as upholding the values of the West.It seems, then, that Sartre is responsible for inicting a mortal offensenot only on the great powers of this world of ours, but also on the earthlyrepresentatives of the world of beyond. No mortal is likely to accomplishmuch more.

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YET, EVERY COIN HAS TWO SI DES , and Sartres case is no exception to the rule.And the rule is that institutions also try to neutralizeabsorb, recuperate,assimilate (Sartres words)their rebels.

To describe in any detail the temptations extended toward Sartrewould ll too many pages. We must be satised with the mention of just a few.

Characteristically, offers of integration arrive from both directions. Not

long after being elected Vice-President of the Association of France-USSR(a post he keeps up to his resignation following the events of Hungary in1956), he is received with the greatest honors on his journey to Russia.Once denounced by Stalins literary spokesman, Fadeev, as the Hyena ofthe pen, now his booksproducts of the same penare published, andsome of his plays performed, in the USSR. Even Les Maines salesoncethe subject of a diplomatic exchange between the Soviet and the Finnish

Governmentsis performed in the East, though not in Russia but in Prague.Ironically, not before but afterthe Soviet intervention in 1968. Equally, hisrelations with the French Communist Partynotwithstanding some majorsetbacks, as in Hungary in 1956are on the whole quite good between1949 and 1968. Until, that is, Sartres evaluation of May 1968 leads to acomplete, and it seems irreparable, rupture.

As to the other side, the number of offers is literally legion; from that ofthe Lgion dHonneur to the award of the Nobel Prize.

In 1945, in recognition of his merits during the Resistance, he is offeredthe Order of the Lgion dHonneur, but declines it. In 1959, thoughalmost as a clumsy attempt to take back an offer that has not been acceptedMalraux accuses Sartre of collaboration, on the absurd ground that heallowed the performance of his anti-fascist play, Flies,during the Germanoccupation, while in fact it all happened in complete agreement with theResistance group of writers.5


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In May 1949, following Mauriacs attack on his political position,6Sartreturns down Mauriacs offer to get a seat for him among the selected few living

immortalsthe forty members of the Academie franaiseinsisting, in atone of irony, that he is not going to learn equality in the company of thosewho display their own sense of superiority.7In the same spirit, he rejectsthe idea of joining another pinnacle of French culture, the Collge de France,though his former friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, gladly did so.

Sartres stature has to be recognized even as high as the very apex of theinstitutional pyramid: several Presidents of the French Republic address himwith respect. Vincent Auriol, in 1952, condes in Sartre that he nds HenriMartins sentence excessive, but he cannot reduce it until he is allowed to getoff the hook of political protest in which Sartre plays a prominent part. (Sartre,characteristically, does not oblige.) Giscard dEstaing, twenty three yearslater, hastens to assure him that he had found much spiritual nourishmentand inspiration in Sartres writings on freedom. And even the proud Generalde Gaulle, who considered himself Frances destiny, calls Sartre Mon ChrMatre, to which the latter retorts: It is to mark well, I believe, that he intends

to address himself to the man of letters, and not to the president of a tribunal[the Bertrand Russell tribunal on VietnamI. M.] which he is determined notto recognize. I am no Matre, except for the waiter in the caf who knows thatI write.8There cannot be much left to be said after that.

But perhaps the most scandalous of Sartres refusals is his publicrejection of the Nobel Prize,9in 1964. Though he makes it amply clear inhis letter to the Nobel Prize Committee that he would turn down with equal

rmness the Lenin Prize, in the unlikely event that it was awarded to him,Andr Breton accuses him of performing a propaganda operation in favorof the East bloc.10Sartre is condemned for an allegedly premeditated, cal-culated publicity stunt (as if he were in desperate need of publicity, like sur-realism gone stale), although he writes privately to the Swedish Academythe moment the rumors start to circulate that he might be awarded the Prize,trying topreventa decision in his favor, thus rendering unnecessary all pub-licity. This conrms again Fichtes wisdom, namely that when the facts donot t the preconceived ideas, umso schlimmer es fr die Tatsachen, allthe worse for the facts.

The only institution that remains curiously aloof from this race for Sartressoul is the church. But then the church has a well established tradition of rstburning the alleged hereticsas Jeanne dArcs fate reminds uselevatingthem to the ranks of sainthood long after they are dead and gone.


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INTR OD UCTION 19

.

THUS NO ONE CAN DENY that Sartre generates intense passions. And whenhe rejects the generous offers of integration, he is attacked with all the greaterindignation: for what could be more wicked than biting the hand that wantsto spoon feed you?

There is another stratagem: pretended indifference, but this is not ofmuch use with Sartre, as his old adversary Mauriac illustrates very well.When Sartre assumes responsibility for the persecuted Maoist groups

journal,La Cause du Peuple,Mauriac writes in a tone of superiority: The

thirst for martyrdom which Sartre possesses is no reason for putting inprison this incurably inoffensive character.11Sartre answers a few weekslater to all those who adopt Mauriacs line of approach: They often say,for the ruse of the bourgeoisie is like this, that I want to be a martyr and getmyself arrested. But I dont care at all for being arrestedquite the contrary!What I am interested in is that one should not arrest me, for in that way I candemonstrate,and my comrades with me, Louis Malle or someone else, that

there are two weights, two measures.12

Here we can clearly see how Sartre, surrounded by the establishmentchorus of self-complacent laughter, succeeds not only in extricating himselffrom a difficult situationdespite the uneven odds that characterize nearlyall the confrontations in which he is involvedbut also, a somewhat unlikelyoutcome, in ending up on top. For if they arrest him, there will be an outcrythe world over for imprisoning Sartre for a crime of opinion(i.e. apolitical,

and not a criminaloffense); and if they do not arrest him, fearing the conse-quences in world opinion, it is a humbling admission that the crime of thosewho are prosecuted by the Government is in fact apoliticalcrime. A crimeof opinionwhich can lead to imprisonment only in the form of trumped-up charges, under the conspiracy of silence (often condemned by Sartre) ofliberal public opinion.

This is how Sartre squeezes victory out of what is supposed to be a hope-less position of defeat. The positive outcome does not just happen: Sartre is

highly conscious of the paradoxical constituents of his precarious position.It is by no means accidental that he returns time and again to the problem ofwinner loses. He explores the complex dialectic of defeat and victory inorder to grasp and lay bare the ways through which one can reverse the pre-fabricated odds: so as to show how it does come about that Loser wins;indeed that at times loser takes all.


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HOW IS IT POSSIBLE for a solitary individual, whose pen is his onlyweapon, to be as effective as Sartre isand he is uniquely soin an agewhich tends to render the individual completely powerless? What is thesecret of this intellectual who dees, with immense pride and dignity, anyinstitution that interposes itself between him and the realization of thevalues he cares for?

The secret is no real secret: Sartre loudly speaks it out when he denesthe essence of living literature as commitment. All the controversy, indeed

scandal, follows from such denition. It is this passionate commitmentto the concerns of the given world; the Finite (as against the ctitiouspursuit of literary immortality), that acts as a powerful catalyst in thepresent, and a measure of achievement linking the present to the future.Not the remote future over which the living individual has no controlwhatsoever, but the future at hand, the one within our reach whichtherefore shapes and structures our present life. Other than such commit-

ment to ones own, however painful, temporality, there is only the worldof evasion and illusion. This is the measure we propose to the writer: aslong as his books arouse anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if heis no more than a shade, he will live. Afterwards, the deluge. We stand foran ethics and art of the nite says Sartre.13And in every sense he lives upto his own measure.

He is a strange grave-digger of the West. For one could hardly even

imagine a writer more intensely concerned with moral values than this sys-tematic blasphemist and corruptor of youth. This is how he sees thewriters task:

The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain: one doesnot redeem evil, one ghts it. The most beautiful book in the world redeemsitself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the manredeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvationtogether, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to beexplicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.14

If talking in such terms means grave-digging for the West, who can saythat the West does not deserve the fate of being buried forever?

The work, as we can see, is dened in its total setting, and emphaticallynot on its own. It is its dimension of being an actin the struggle against evil


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INTR OD UCTION 21

that compels the reader to dene his or her own position on the issues atstake; and since the actis always clearly in evidence in Sartres works, no

one can bypass him with indifference. They can reject the moral intensityof his measure but they cannot ignore it. Throughout his developmenthe applies with great consistency his criteria of commitment in literature,even though he changes inside permanence.15Almost twenty years afterwriting the passage quoted above, he asks the question: Do you thinkthat I could read Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? And heanswers it with a self-critical affirmation: Facing a dying childNauseahasno weight.16

It goes without saying, the literary world recognizes, with hostility,its own indictment and defends Sartre against himself (not to mentionRobbe-Grillet). For did they not try, as long ago as 1945, to praise Sartresrst work, Nausea,as his literary testament,17so as to lock him into thewalls of this national good, produced by its author at the age of thirty?

.

IT IS NOT EASY TO LOCK SARTRE into anything, let alone into the prisoncell of timeless literary excellence. His view of the writers commitment isa total one:

If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by

commitment. It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a writtensentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makesno sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated byits literature?. . . You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doingsomething.18

This conception of literature as a critical mirror19 of man and theepoch shared by the writer with his fellow men sounds outrageousascandal to all those whose sensitivity has been modeled on lart pourlartand on the self-contemplating irrelevance of various isms. Goethecould still take for granted that every poem was aZeitgedicht, a poem of itstime. But that was before the ravages of alienation succeeded in inducingthe writer to fall back upon his own inner resources. And while this isola-tion of the writer from its epoch and from the fellow human beings is thereal scandal, as a general acceptance of alienation by prevailing literary


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opinion, Sartres passionate rejection of it appears as unforgivable scandal,as betrayal, indeed as blasphemy.

To challenge established opinion, with all its institutions and institution-alized values, requires not only a set of rmly held beliefs but a very strongegoas well. And Sartre undoubtedly possesses them all. The articulation ofhis lifework is characterized by immense pride and dignity. For what could heaccomplish with humility in a hostile environment? An insane pride is nec-essary to write you can only afford to be modest after you have sunk yourpride in your work, writes Sartre.20And he is by no means alone in this. Hisvision of total commitment reminds us of a great Hungarian poets words:

Pushing aside intruding Graces,I didnt come to be an artist,But to be everything,I was the Master;The poem: fancy slave.21

In Sartres view, Art in its totality is engaged in the activity of a singleman,as he tests and pushes back its limits. But writing cannot be criticalwithout calling everything into question: this is its content. The adventureof writing undertaken by each writer challenges the whole of mankind.22

To take upon oneself the burden of this challenge, and consciously so, ashappens to be the case with Sartre, is far from being an easy decision. Butonce the writers fundamental project is dened in such terms, he cannot

shrink from the magnitude of his task without losing his own integrity (orauthenticity). He has to articulate the concerns of the whole of his epoch,and follow them through, no matter what.

His vision of the wholecarries with it a constant reminder of his ownresponsibility for it all.Even if they want to absolve him of this responsi-bility, he must by calling everythinginto question assert and reassert hisown inalienable right to assume the burden of total responsibility. For thewhole of his epoch and the whole of mankind. This is why he cannothelp being intransigent in an age dominated by evasion and subterfuge,compromise and escape; in short by reied institutional self-assurance, inplace of facing and tackling the contradictions which in their chronic non-resolution ultimately foreshadow the prospect of collective suicide. Andsince this unattering truth cannot be brought home to ears deafened bythe self-complacent noise of comforting compromise except by the loudestcry of the voice of intransigence, uncompromising moral and intellectual


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INTR OD UCTION 23

intransigence (not to be confused with the quarrelsome pursuit of narrowself-interest) becomes the fundamental virtue of the epoch, asine qua nonof

signicant achievement.23

.

YES, EVERY MAN CARRIES A WHOLE EPOCH within him, just as a wave carriesthe whole of the sea. But there are waves and waves, as there are seas andseas. The sea which is our own epoch is far from being a quiet one, even inits most peaceful moments; it is the turbulent sea of a make or break age oftransition from one social order to another, and Sartre is a giant wave of thismighty sea. He can express many aspects of the dynamic turmoil, followingits changes in many different ways, but he categorically refuses to assume theshape of entertaining ripples on the surface of the sea, so as to hide undersome cheerful diversion the gathering storm.

It is not comforting to be reminded of the coming of the storm, butSartre cannot help being a constant reminder: one would look in vain for

playful serenity in his massive oeuvre. No one in this century has summonedup with greater intensity the combined resources of philosophy and cre-ative literature in order to demonstrate the possibilities and the limitationsof the individual as situated at this crucial juncture of human history. If thetormented articulation of his vision is disturbing, it is not his fault. Nor is itsurprising that precisely the most valid and farsighted elements of this visionas we shall see latershould meet with the greatest incomprehension and

hostility, leading to isolation: the ironical predicament of lonely notoriety.In this again he shares the fate of the great poet Jzsef, who says:

No easy comfort for men:My words are rising mould.Clear and heavy to bearI am, like the cold.24

Comfortless, cold clarity pervades many of Sartres works, and noreader can assume in relation to them the attitude of cool detachment.There are two principal factors which make such detachment impossible:the organicconnection of the methods of literature and philosophy, andthe careful situation of every detail in relation to the complex totality towhich they belong.


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From the beginning, Sartres work has been characterized by a con-scious effort to combine philosophy and literature in order to intensify the

powers of demonstration and persuasion. We shall see later the specicforms of this effort across his development. The point here is simply tostress the purposebehind this method. It arises out of the authors con-viction that against the power of prevailing myths and vested interests theforce of analytical reason is impotent: one does not displace an existing,rmly rooted positive (in the Hegelian sense positive) reality by the sheernegativity of conceptual dissection. If the weapon of criticism is to succeed,it must match the evocative powerof the objects which it opposes. This iswhy the real work of the committed writer is . . . to reveal, demystify, anddissolve myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath.25The imagery clearlydisplays the nature of the enterprise. It is to prevent opting out with cooldetachment. What is at stake is nothing less than a general assault on thewell established positions of cosy comfort, whether they appear as thecomplicity of silence or in any other form. Sartre wants to shake us,andhe nds the ways of achieving his aim, even if in the end he is condemned

as someone constantly in search of scandals.The other point, the concern with totality,is equally important. Sartre

insists that the beauty of literature lies in its desire to be everythingand notin a sterile quest for beauty. Only a whole can be beautiful:those who cantunderstand thiswhatever they may have said have not attacked me in thename of art, but in the name of theirparticular commitment.26Indeed, thereal character of a particular commitment is not recognizable without laying

bare its links with the given totality. Particularismcan and must claim thestatus of universalityin the absence of a comprehensive frame of reference,since the failure to be in a proper perspective necessarily transforms particu-larism itself into its own perspective, and thus into the measure of everythingelse. Any attempt to reveal the proper connections with totality must there-fore clash with the interests of the prevailing particularisms. At the sametime, the unveiling of particularisms does not leave only their championsnaked but suddenly exposes also the vulnerability of all those who werepreviously able to nd self-assurance and (however illusory) comfort in thesheltered corners of various particularisms.

But there is no other way. The critical mirror cannot fulll its func-tions if it is fragmented into a thousand pieces. Such a broken mirror canonly show distorting details even when they appear to be faithful in theirimmediacy: distorting because severed from the whole which alone canconfer upon them their full (i.e. true) signicance. The choice is therefore


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INTR OD UCTION 25

unavoidable. Either one abandons the aim of bearing witness to the age inwhich one lives, and thus ceases to be a critical mirror; or one appropriates

the epoch in the only way in which this can be done through writing by theuncomforting, cold clarity of a work which reveals, shows, demonstratesthe connections of the parts with the whole, demystifying and dissolving thefetishes of the seemingly rock-solid, established immediacy in the dynamicframework of constantly changing totality. There can be no doubt of whichis Sartres choice.

.

THE FOCUS OF SARTRES GRAPPLING with totality is his search for freedom.Everything appears in relation to this concern. He calls his novel cycle Roadsto Freedom: a title that might well sum up the character of his work as awhole. (This applies as much to his literary as to his philosophical/theore-tical work.) And precisely because his work has the focus it does have, Sartre

never gets lost in the sociohistorical totality of which he is a tireless explorer.Of course, his preoccupation with freedom goes through many meta-

morphoses. There is a world of difference, even if accomplished linte-rieur dune permanence (inside permanence), between saying that manis free so as to commit himself, but he is not free unless he commits himselfso as to be free27and recognizing that no one is free unless everybody isfree . . . Freedom is conditionednot metaphysically but practically by

protein.28

The rst quotation offers a solution only in the form of a verbalparadox; the second, by contrast, assumes a more modest posture, but indi-cates some tangible targets for human action. All the sameand this is whyhe is right to talk about change inside permanencethe organizing centreand structuring core of Sartres work remains his all-embracing concern forfreedom. The removal of hunger and exploitation do not appear as ends inthemselves but as necessary stepping stones towards the liberation of man,towards the realization of his freedom.

Sartres work covers an enormous area and shows an immense variety:from occasional articles to a novel cycle, from short stories to massive philo-sophical syntheses, from lm scripts to political pamphlets, from plays toreections on art and music, and from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, aswell as monumental biographies, attempting to grasp the inner motivationsof unique individuals in relation to the specic social-historical conditions ofthe age which shaped them and which in their turn they helped to transform.


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Yet one cannot say that the trees hide the wood. Quite the contrary. It isSartres lifework as a whole that predominates, and not particular elements

of it. While one can undoubtedly think of unique masterpieces among hisnumerous writings, they do not account by themselves for his true signi-cance. One might go as far as to say that it is his total fundamental project,with all its manifold transformations and permutations, which denes theuniqueness of this restless author, and not the accomplishment of even hismost disciplined work. For it is an integral part of his project that he con-stantly changes and revises his previous positions: the many-faceted workarticulates itself through its transformations, and totalization is achievedthrough ceaseless de-totalization and re-totalization.

Success and failure thus become very relative terms for Sartre: they turninto one another. Success is the manifestation of failure and failure is thereality of success. As Sartre puts it, in the domain of expression, successis necessarily failure,29and he quotes his friend, Giacometti, according towhom when failure reaches its climax and all is lost, at this point . . . youcan throw your sculpture in the rubbish bin or exhibit it in a gallery.30The

reason is (though this is not quite how Sartre puts it, tending at this pointtowards a timeless explanation) that the writer and the artist in our age haveto assemble their work from fragmented pieces. For fragmentation and com-partmentalization (or, at another level, isolation and privatization) are notmere gments of the intellectuals imagination but objective characteristicsof contemporary socio-historical reality. And this makes the work, evenwhen it consciously aims at totalizationinherently problematical.

There are many different ways of facing up to this problem; the namesof Proust and Thomas Mann indicate two clearly contrasting attempts. Butneither Prousts ordered subjectivity, nor Thomas Manns disciplined andrestrained objectivity can be compared to Sartres project. The relevantcomparison is Picasso, whatever their differences: both devour, with insa-tiable appetite, everything that comes their way, and produce not so muchrepresentative works as a representative lifework.

Thus it does not matter that particular works are not paradigm sum-mations of the artist, in the sense in which la recherche du temps perduand The Magic Mountaincertainly are. It does not matter that the particularworks (even Guernica)are more problematical than the ones which, by con-trast, are constituted on the basis of a most careful sifting and elaborationof the given moments of reality. If Picasso and Sartre have to move on froma particular kind of synthesis to something on the face of it quite different,it is because what is involved in their quest is a type of totalization which


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INTR OD UCTION 27

always refers to the artists lifework as its immediate ground. Theirs is asingular form of subjectivity in comparison to Proust and Thomas Mann.

The former produces his synthesis by dissolving the world of objects in hisinteriority and subjectivity; the latter makes the writers subjectivity recedequietly behind a carefully reconstructed objectivity. In both Sartre andPicasso, subjectivity is always in evidence but uses as its vehicle the world ofobjects, not to subjectivize it but to nihilate it (to use Sartres expression)in the course of depiction. As a result of this dialectical process of objec-tivation-nihilationa rst cousin of Brechts Verfremdungseffektthe life-work is enriched, paradoxically, at the expense of the particular work whichit uses to stand on its own shoulders, so to speak. We are captivated bythe processof nihilating objectication that produces the lifework, and notnecessarily by particular results. Just how many individual works survive inthe long run is irrelevant. What matters is the constitution of a representativelifework: a singular fusion of subjectivity and objectivity.

The great variety and mass of Sartres particular projects readily com-bines into a coherent whole. The extraordinary coherence of his lifework

is not preconceived. It is not the result of an original blueprint which isimposed on every detail as time goes by: that would be an articial, externalunity. Here we have to do, on the contrary, with an inner unity that pre-vails through the most varied manifestations of formal divergence. This is anevolvingunity that emergesthrough more or less spontaneous explorationsof the roads to freedomor, for that matter, of the manifold obstacles tofreedomwhatever they happen to be. The unity is thereforestructuraland

not thematic:the latter would be far too restrictive for a lifework. (Some ofSartres works are, though, characterized by an attempt to achieve a thematicunity, and by no means always with a happy result, most notably his novelcycle; but this is another matter.) Thus Sartre is right in rejecting suggestionsthat his conception of commitment in literature leads to thematic restrictionand political illustration as well as to a paralysis of artistic spontaneity.

But to stress how the exploration of the roads to freedom producesthe structural unity of Sartres work is not enough to take hold of its speci-city. It is equally important to put into relief the structuring role of Sartresconception of the individualin his work as a whole. For freedomdoes notappear in itsgeneralitythat would be thematically restrictive political illus-tration or abstract symbolism, both rejected by Sartrebut always as mani-fest through particular existential predicaments,whether the subject is fromGreek antiquity or from Modern France. It is in this sense that he is andremains an existentialist.


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Kant asserted theprimacy of practical reason(i.e. the supremacy of moraljudgement) in the architectonic of his system, and he carried through this

principle with exemplary consistency. Sartrenot only as a young man, butalso as the author of an ethical work written at the age of sixty 31 quotesKants you ought to, therefor you can, and insists on the primacy and cen-trality of individual praxes vis--vis collective and institutional structures.Such a statement clearly assigns a prominent place to the world of morality.This could not be otherwise without undermining the inner unity and con-sistency of Sartres work. For, as he remarks in 1944, Morality is . . . mydominant preoccupation; it always has been.32 And so it has remainedever since, directly or indirectly, in theoretical and in literary forms. It is thisprimacy and centrality assigned to individual praxes, in close relation withthe problematics of freedom, which denes the specicity of Sartres funda-mental project through all the variety of its manifestations.

.

THE POINT OF READING A CONTEMPORARY is to recognize and examineourselves in his critical mirror. This is not a one-way business. For readingis interpreting and thus necessarily implies not only an examination ofourselves, but at the same time also a critical examination of the mirror and ofits relationship to the epoch which it reveals. As Sartre puts it, recognizablyin terms of his own central concerns, the reader freely allows himself to be

inuenced. This fact alone is enough to quash the fable of his passivity. Thereader invents us: he uses our words to set his own traps for himself. He isactive, he transcends us.33

This is particularly true of reading a contemporary author. For there aremany crucial junctures of experience which we share with him. This confersa privileged position on the reader in his critical dialogue with his livingcontemporary. But saying that only accounts for the credit side of the equa-tion. The debit side consists in the particular difficulties of evaluating thelifework of a living contemporary. All my works, says Sartre, are facets ofa wholewhose meaning one cannot really appreciate until Ill have brought itall to an end.34This is true enough. But not quite. Were it categorically true,evaluation of a contemporary author would be a prioriimpossible. The jobof the critic would oscillate between arbitrary subjectivity (inventingthe author entirely out of ones own concerns, using his words only as apretext for pseudo-objective self-exhibition) and the dead objectivityof mere


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INTR OD UCTION 29

description of the works reviewed: a superuous and hopeless venture.To be sure, evaluation can proceed only from the whole, which is, by

denition, incomplete so long as the lifework has not been brought to itsend. All the same, when one deals with a signicant author, whose individualworks are facets of a whole, new and possible additions are not capriciousattempts at a radical break, but additions which arefeasiblein relation to thegiven and self-evolving whole. In other words, all modications representchange lintrieur dune permanence, in accordance with the dialecticof continuity and discontinuity. Thestructuringelements of an original life-work are clearly visible at a relatively early age; and the tendenciesof a writ-ers quest are displayed through the typeof variations the particular worksrepresent in relation to one another.

And there is a crucialone might say strategicpoint of reference:the stubborn recurrence of some basic concerns which assume the formofincompleteor unnished(for within the given writers project unnish-able)works. When a writers lifework is suddenly brought to its end, whathappens is that the former incompleteness is elevated to the level of comple-

tion. Paradoxically, in the shape of works unnishablefor inner reasonswend anticipations of the completed lifework; and we nd these in particularabundance in Sartres oeuvre. A closer look at themnot in isolation butin relation to the restmay help to provide the vantage point from which acritical assessment of a living contemporary becomes possible.


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P A R T O N E

T U L W:O S D

The important thing is not what one is but what one does.35


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. T W H S

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A WRITER CREATES HIS WORKfrom the raw material of experience given tohim by the contingency of his situation, even if, as in Kafka, the end resultseems to have very little in common with the immediate ground from whichthe work emanates. Some writers, like Villon, throw themselves right inthe middle of the turmoil of their epoch, and live through the events withgreat intensity at the level of particularized human conicts and adventures.Others, like Schiller or Hegel, leave the ground of their direct experiencemuch more radically behind them when they articulate in works their viewof the meaning of their age. And, of course, there can be a virtually endlessnumber of variations between the two extremes.

The interchange of life and work of which Sartre is intensely awareitis enough to mention in this respect Saint Genetand The Idiot of the Familyon Flaubertconstitutes the writers life in the interest of his work and vice

versa; he makes his work and his work makes its author. But, of course, itall happens within a given social framework which constitutes both thehorizon and the groundof human achievement. The writer does not leada life of double book-keeping. He reaches out for experience in the spiritof his work in the course of its articulation, and he transforms the acquiredexperience into work. Thus he turns contingency into necessitywithinthe broad framework of his social reality: the ground and the horizon of a


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free and conditioned workand at the same time he turns the necessityof this ground and horizon into the new contingency of a somewhat modi-

ed starting point for his contemporaries, who are now challenged to denethemselves also in relation to his work.Three important questions arise in this context:

1. How and whydoes a writer choose writing as the specic form in whichthe interaction of life and work is carried out?

2. Given his original choice, how does he erect from the scraps ofcontingency at his disposal the structured necessity of his work? For noman comes in direct contact with the World Spirit, not even Hegelwho thinks to glance at it in the shape of Napoleon on horseback on thebattleeld of Jena.

3. What is the spectrum of his feasible work, that is,whatcan be successfullyaccomplished in the framework of his fundamental project, given the

dialectical interchange between the sum of the writers lived experienceand the particular projects on which he embarks? In other words, whatkind of work can he make while being made by them?

The rst question concerns the nature and constitution of the writersfundamental project. In a generalized form (i.e. asking the same sort ofquestion about individuals in general, to whatever walk of life they may

belong) it can be phrased like this: By what activity can an accidental indi-vidual realize the human person within himself and for all?36This makes itclear that the form in which we encounter the problem in so many of Sartresworks (Words, Saint Genet,Of rats and men, The Idiot of the Family,forexample) is a searching confrontation of a typical modern problem ren-dered increasingly acute by a certain type of social development: a processof individualization and privatization inseparable from the advancement ofalienation. As Marx puts it: The present condition of society displays itsdifference from the earlier state of civil society in that in contrast to thepastit does not integrate the individual within its community. It dependspartly on chance,partly on the individuals effort, etc., whether or not heholds on to his station.37The accidental individual, divorced from hisuniversal being, must therefore embark on a project of great complexity:a journey of discovery how to realize the human person within himselfand for all. A journey that ends only by death: either the suicide of a


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THE WRITE R AND HIS SITUATION 35

self-complacent coming-to-a-halt (for example, the institutionalized andrecuperated writer) or the natural death which is the completion of life.

Thus, the fundamental project and its articulation through particular proj-ects become the same, and the originally envisaged discovery assumes theform of a constant rediscovery of authentic self-renewal in accordance withthe individuals changing situation, in the interest of realizing the humanperson within himself and for everyone else. Accordingly, Sartres oftenrecurring examination of the constitution of a writers project whether hisown or someone elseswhich might appear to the supercial observer asa narcissistic obsession, is in fact concerned with the meaning of every indi-viduals enterprise. A quest for a meaning in society in which he cannot helpbeing an accidental individual but which he must in some way transcendif he is to snatch back his own humanityfor himself and for allfrom thepowers of alienation.

.

TO ANSWER THE SECOND QUESTION in detail is a truly forbidding undertaking.For it involves the collection and evaluation of a virtually innite number ofdata. And once innity enters an equation whether in quantum theoryor in the Sartrean project on Genet and on Flaubert (not to mention thoseabandoned, after some hundreds of pages, on Mallarm and on Tintoretto) thewhole equation becomes methodologically problematical to an extreme degree.

It is by no means accidental that Saint Genet, originally intended as ashort preface to a volume of Genets writings, grows into a massive workof 573 pages, only to be dwarfed later by the several thousandand alwaysincompletepages of the study on Flaubert, also originally envisaged asa much more limited project. If one adds to these the considerable massof Sartres abandoned works of this kind there is clearly something to beexplained. This will be attempted in its proper context, in Part Three, for itis inextricably linked to Sartres conception of history as singular and non-universalizable; a conception that seeks to demonstrate the dialecticalintelligibility of that which is not universalizable.38Here the point is simplyto emphasize the relevance of the question to an understanding of Sartrehimself in two respects. First, Sartre always combines the investigation of awriters fundamental project with an enquiry, in extenso,into the concreteways in which he squeezes necessity out of the contingencies of his situation,thus producing the exemplary validity of a work whose constituents are, in


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principle, readily available in each and every one of us. Secondly, turninginto necessity the scraps of contingency as encountered in everyday circum-

stances is much in evidence in Sartres own development. This is the sensein which the unity of his work emerges, not out of some mythical originalblueprint, but on the basis of a totalizing determinationwhich aims at inte-grating the elements of transformed facticity into a coherent whole. Wecan only indicate a few particular events and circumstances as typesof suchtransformations, thus violating Sartres own rule about the non-universal-izability of the singular.

In 1940 41, while prisoner of war, Sartre obtains the works of Heideggerapersona gratissimawith the Nazis and gives a course on his philosophyto some fellow-prisoner military chaplains. Naturally, Kierkegaard is also anintegral part of their discussions, which in their intensity lay the foundationsofBeing and Nothingness,drafted a year later. Around Christmas, in thesame company, Sartre writes his rst play,Barionaor the Son of Thunder.Both events acquire a major signicance for his future. The experience ofwritingBarionaand its reception by his comrades determine Sartres view

that the theatre ought to be a great collective religious experience39aview reaffirmed by him on many occasions, stressing the organic connec-tion between theatre and myth. (The idea goes well beyond theatre only, aswe shall see in the next chapter.) Similarly, the integration of Kierkegaardand Heidegger into Sartres world of ideas and images carries far-reachingconsequences. His book Saint Genet adopts as its structuring principle(for interpreting Genets metamorphoses) the Kierkegaardian stages: the

ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious, though the third metamor-phosis is now identied as the predicament of the Writer. But as we learnin many places, in my imagination, literary life was modeled on religiouslife. . . . I had transposed religious needs into literary longings.40

Also, the depth of his contact with Kierkegaard can be measured withSartres innumerable references to the singular, or indeed to the singularuniversal. The same goes for Heidegger. His role cannot be overestimatedin the formation of Sartres structure of thought. It would be useless to spec-ulate what would have happened had Sartre been given the experience ofa Russian instead of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, with the works of Marxand Lenin on the shelves. Useless not only because of the inherent sterilityof counterfactual conditionals but also because his rst acquaintance withHeideggers writings, though not very deep, predates the war experience bysome ten years. In any case, Sartre puts Heidegger to his own use. It wouldbe as mistaken to read Sartre through Heideggers eyes as the other way


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round. All the same, one cannot build a crystal palace from stone. Thus,while Sartre is right in defending himself against sectarian attacks on account

of Heideggers Nazi past, his arguments on the real issue are far from con-vincing. He says: And then Heidegger, so what? If we discover our ownthought propos of another philosopher, if we ask him for techniques andmethods susceptible to make us accede to new problems, does that meanthat we marry all his theories? Marx had borrowed from Hegel his dialectic.Would you say therefore that Capitalis a Prussian work?41The point is notonly that Sartre borrows from Heidegger much more than techniques andmethods but alsoand this is far more importantthat he neversubmitsHeideggers work to that radical settling of accounts which characterizesMarxs relationship to Hegel.

What we can see in all these instances is that contingency is in a sensesuperseded. Not that the writer can do whatever he pleases. (As a matter offact, Sartre has to pay a high price for adopting a great deal from Heideggerstruncated ontology which can found only itself and therefore must coil backinto itself. More about this later.) Contingency does not give way to some

mystical freedom emanating from the intellectuals subjectivity but to astructured necessity. What happens before our very eyes is that the acci-dentalcharacter of contingency is transcended and metamorphosed intothe necessity of inner determinations.

.

THE THIRD QUESTION RAISED ABOVE the spectrum of a writers feasiblework is directly linked to the range of his personal experiences. In 1959,after praising Franoise Sagan for producing something new on the basisof personal experience,42Sartre indicates that one of the main factors inhis decision to abandon writing novels was his awareness of the deciencies(manque) in his own personal experiences. In a more generalized sense,his decision is linked to a denition of the novel as prose which aims atthe totalization of a singular and ctive temporalization,43 and sincehis own personal experiences cannot provide the ground of the kind ofrepresentative totalization required by the novel form, Sartre has to adoptin the end someone elses singular temporalization by producing, in TheIdiot of the Family, what he calls a true novel.44

This is not as simple as it looks. To be sure, Sartres life is not very adven-turous. In fact most of it is spent on a demonic dedication to work. The


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sheer mass of his production is staggering. Some ve or six million wordsalready published, and perhaps another two to three million sunk in manu-

scripts lost or abandoned, or yet to be published: more than enough to keephalf a dozen scribes busy all their life during the Middle Ages just to copyout such an amount. When asked about his extraordinary wealth of produc-tion, he explains half-apologetically: One can be productive without toomuch work. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening: thisis my only rule. Even on journeys. I carry out little by little a consciouslyelaborated plan of work.45

It is daunting to learn that six hours of intensive work, every day, even onjourneys, is considered little by little. The whole truth, however, is evenmore daunting. For we know from other sources (primarily from Simone deBeauvoirs memoirs) that often he writes day and night, and is preparedto spend twenty-eight hours in one stretch on revising a single article.46Noris such intensity reserved for rare occasions. On the contrary, it seems to bethe rule rather than the exception. Many of Sartres literary works are writtenin a few days or weeks. More amazing still, his two monumental theoretical

works,Being and Nothingnessand Critique of Dialectical Reasonwere eachwritten in a few months.47Moreover, Franois Erval tells me, often wholechapters are rewritten from beginning to end just because Sartre is dissatis-ed with some details. If one adds to all this the endless number of hoursspent on discussions, correspondence, interviews, rehearsals of plays, lec-tures, political and editorial meetings, and so on, clearly there cannot bemuch time left over for personal experiences. One book authors, like

Sagan, may abundantly afford them; not Sartre, who just cannot stop, totake life as it comes: he must be active all the time.48

In any case, the meaning of a writers personal experience is dialectical:it should not be turned into a frozen fetish. Does not Sartre always insist,rightly, that the work makes its author while he creates his work? This dia-lectical interchange between work and experience could not nd a clearermanifestation than in Sartre. We can sense it already in his rst originalpiece of theoretical writing, a letter contributed to an enquiry among stu-dents published inLes Nouvelles littrairesat the beginning of 1929. Thereis only one earlier theoretical work by Sartre, an essay entitled Theory ofthe state in modern French thought,49but that is a very different proposi-tion. It shows nothing of Sartres future path. It merely puts a few sultanasof originality in the insipid dough of academic conventionality. By contrast,in the letter to the Nouvelles Littraireswe get the rst glimpse of the realSartre: a formidable gure. It is not whathe says but the wayhe approaches


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the problem that makes this letter a truly original beginning, well worth alonger quotation:

It is a paradox of the human mind that Man, whose business it is to create thenecessary conditions, cannot raise himself above a certain level of existence,like those fortune-tellers who can tell other peoples future, but not theirown. This is why, at the root of humanity, as at the root of nature, I can seeonly sadness and boredom. It is not that Man does not think of himself as abeing. On the contrary, he devotes all his energies to becoming one. Whencederive our ideas of Good and Evil, ideas of men working to improve Man.

But these concepts are useless. Useless, too, is the determinism which oddlyenough attempts to create a synthesis of existence and being. We are as freeas you like, but helpless. . . . For the rest, the will to power, action and lifeare not only useless ideologies. There is not such thing as the will to power.Everything is too weak: all things carry the seeds of their own death. Aboveall, adventureby which I mean that blind belief in adventitious and yetinevitable concatenation of circumstances and eventsis a delusion. In this

sense, the adventurer is an inconsequential determinist who imagines he isenjoying complete freedom of action.50

No doubt this is already a synthesishowever preliminary: the resultof much questioning and dissecting. It is the summation of all the personalexperiences which made possible such reection and generalization in therelatively trivial context of a student enquiry. The mark of a commanding

and imposing personality is well evidenced by the fact that he elects to voiceprecisely such heavy-going metaphysical fundamentals on such an occa-sion, when others might be content to complain about digs and catering.This is not simply an occasional piece, though it is that too. What mattersmore is that it is the project of life, whatever the implications it may carry forthe personal as well as literary-intellectual development of its author. Hegrasps a major paradox, which in turn takes hold of him, and thus he getsinvolved in the lifelong project of reaching the roots of being (italicized bySartre) through questioningMan and nature, mind and existence, humanityand ideology, good and evil, freedom and adventure, death and determinism.What a maiden speech for a student learning to y in the world of ideas!

This quest for the roots of being is of necessity a project of totalizationpar excellence. It is the whole that predominates in so far as the elements anddetails of reality must be always brought into relation with the foundationof being. Thus the overriding characteristic of the work must be synthesis


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and not analysis: the latter can only assume a subordinate position, as a wellmarked preliminary stage to the emerging synthesis. This is why Sartre con-

siders himself diametrically opposed to Proust, despite his great admirationfor this French classic writer, insisting that Proust takes delight in analysiswhile the inherent tendency of his own work issynthesis.51Sartres descrip-tion of his religious model of literatureconceived as an all-encompassingand all-fullling enterpriseis only another name for this synthesizing,which profoundly affects every facet of life and work, from character to workmethod, from personal relations to the writers perception of and attitude tothe world of objects, and from the style of life to the structure and style ofthe work itself. And since the ultimate point of reference is being, with itsexistential bearing on everything, the surveyed facets of the whole cannotbe approached with detached objectivity (we are always inside the perim-eters of the quest: integral parts and not sovereign observers of it) but witha powerfulfusionof subjectivity and objectivity, more often than not underthe predominance of the former. Kierkegaard spoke of innite compellingsubjectivity.52 In Sartre we are faced also with compelling subjectivity

(sometimes identied as voluntarism), even if with a more restrained formthan in his great predecessor. No matter how abstract a problem may be initself, it is always converted into a lived idea in the course of it being situ-ated in relation to being.

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A FEW EXAMPLES MUST SUFFICE to illustrate this interpenetration ofsubjectivity and objectivity. Take the concept of space and distance. Weare told by Sartre that distance was inventedby man and has no meaningoutside the context of humanspace; it separated Hero from Leander andMarathon from Athens, but does not separate one pebble from another.The point is hammered home by describing a personal experience ofabsolute proximity in a prison camp where my skin was the boundaryof my living space. Day and night I felt the warmth of a shoulder or a thighagainst my body. But it was never disturbing, as the others were a part ofme. This is contrasted with his return home: I had rejoined bourgeoissociety. Where I would have to learn to live once again at a respectfuldistance.53 And all this is to prepare the ground for an exploration ofGiacomettis handling of space and distance, in relation to the plenitudeof being and the void of nothingness.


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Simone de Beauvoir writes of Sartre that if it had been necessary, hewould have been willing to remain anonymous: the important thing was that

his ideas should prevail.54

This is all very well, except that anonymityandthe prevalence of Sartres ideaslived ideasis a contradiction in terms.Ideas like those of Sartre must be dramatically asserted, if necessary throughthe most extreme manifestations of compelling subjectivity. Thus noto-riety and scandal are necessary concomitants of his all-embracing projecttowards being, and anonymity must remain at most some momentarylonging for peace under the strain of scandal and notoriety.

Sartres relations to people, works of art, everyday objects and so on,are sketched, in his works as much as in real life, with dramatic colorsHe does not simply like or dislike what he sees in the Prado Museum butloaths and detests Titian and admires Hieronymous Bosch. One look ata gathering in an Oxford College is enough to make him detest the snob-bery of Oxford society and never to set foot in that city again. It is part ofthe economy of life that he has to make up his mind about everything withgreat speed and intensity, always looking for an overall evaluation which

can be integrated into his totalizing search. Similarly with personal rela-tions, even some of the closest friendships have to be dramatically termi-nated (for example those with Camus and Merleau-Ponty) as soon as heperceives that continued friendship would interfere with the realizationof his aims. He orders all his personal relations, including the most inti-mate ones, in such a way that he shall never be diverted from his single-minded dedication to the central concerns of his life. He refuses to accept

the responsibility and burden of family life precisely for that reason. Herefuses to be trapped by the conditions of bourgeois comfort and tries tobanish money and possessions from his personal life.

Equally, he explores, with great passion and imagination, modes of expe-rience which to a less compelling subjectivity would appear to be, in prin-ciple, a book closed forever. Thus he gets involved in a passionate discussionofNegritude,totally indifferent to the possibility that his eidetic analysis ofit (since it cannot be other than that) might be, as it has been, dismissed asdisastrous55by those who experience it from the inside. Problematical assuch a venture might be, how could he do without it in his totalizing questfor being when racism looms so large, with the most devastating implica-tions, in the totality of our predicament? Thus, paradoxically, compel-ling subjectivity is the necessary condition of some degree of objectivity(the objectivity of facing up to the problem with real concern), whereas theobjectivity of modest withdrawalthe acknowledgement of a white mans


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inadequacies to such a taskwould mean the worst kind of subjectivity, thatof evasive complicity.

A similar manifestation of Sartres compelling subjectivity is whenhe tells Daniel Gurin that he doesnt understand anything of his ownbook.56Preposterous as such a statement must appear from the point ofview of the criticized author, the relative justication for it is that the contextinto which Sartre inserts Gurins account of the French Revolution (theSartrean dialectical assessment of the ontological structure of history)imposes a signicantly different angle on the particular events discussedand thus it puts into focus dimensions which remained hidden or sec-ondary to the historian in the original context. One may thoroughly dis-agree with Sartres conception of the ontological structure of history, bornout of his own specic concerns and clearly exhibiting the marks of hiscompelling personality, but it is impossible to deny that it throws radicallynew light on our understanding of the structures and institutions we canidentify in the course of historical development.

The I is in the foreground of virtually everything Sartre writes, and

his subjectivity is carried, if necessary, to the point of belligerence. Heemphatically refuses to withdraw into the background and assume the roleof an objective guide whose function is merely to point at objects, works,and events, or at some well established connections between them. In hisview, just like distance, objects must be brought to life by presenting themthrough the writers subjectivity before they can be inserted into meaningfulhuman discourse, otherwise they remain dead things and fetishes. Critics

have often wondered why Sartre does not write lyric poetry, not noticingthat he does it all the time, though not as a separate genre, but as diffusethroughout his work. What could be more lyrical than his description ofGiacomettis handling of distance as linked to his own homecoming fromprison camp to live life at a respectful distance?

Sartresstyleis determined by the great complexities of his overall projectof totalization. Talking about the rst volume of his Critique of DialecticalReason,he admits that its length (nearly 400.000 words) could be somewhatreduced if he could spend on it much time and effort, but he adds: All thesame, it would very much resemble the work as it is now. For, basically, itssentences are so long, so full of parentheses, quotation marks, of in so far asetc., only because every sentence represents the unity of a dialectical move-ment.57It is impossible to convey the unity of a dynamic movement, with allits complexities, by using static devices such as short root sentences, simpli-ed meaning, or by concentrating on one aspect, for the sake of clarity, while


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neglecting many others. The deceptive translucency of analytic dissection,disregarding the need for meaningful syntheses, produces only irrelevance or

misrepresentation. Style and method must match the full complexity of thetask itself, otherwise they are prefabricated devices articially superimposedon any subject matter, irrespective of its specic nature and inner demands.Sartre consciously opposes to this practice of Procrustean superimposition(frequently witnessed in modern art and thought, from philosophy to soci-ology and from economics to anthropology) his own method of capturingmovement and intricacy. If sharply focusing on one aspect at the expense ofothers represents distortion, since only the proper conjunction of the one withthe many constitutes the relevant whole, he aims at clarifying and revealingindeterminacy, paradoxical as this may sound. This is what he praises inGiacometti, stressing that it should not be confused with vagueness theresult of failure. For the indeterminate quality that comes from lack of skill hasnothing in common with the calculatedindetermination of Giacometti, whichcould more accurately be termed overdetermination (surdetermination).58Itis the adoption of this principle of overdetermination, corresponding to the

structure of totality, in conjunction with what Sartre terms the principle ofindividuation,59which denes the specicity of his style and the vitality ofhis method as arising from the soil of his totalizing quest for being. The wholeis grasped through the simultaneity of calculated indetermination (overde-termination) and the shifting presence of graphic individuation whereby evenabsence becomes tangible as a vital dimension of totality (see for example thediscussion of Pierre missing from the caf in Being and Nothingness). Thus

movement and rest, the whole and its parts, the centre and the periphery, thepremier plan and the background, the determinations from the past and theanticipations of the future converging on the present, all come to life in thesynthetic unity of a dialectical totalization in which subjectivity and objectivityare inextricably fused.

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AS W E CAN SE E T HE N, the work carries the marks of the writers personality inevery respect, from the choice of astonishing subject matter (like Negritude)through modes of analysis and depiction to the style and method of writing.Viewed from the other side, the inner determinations of a certain overallproject determine in their turn a belligerent character, a compellingsubjectivity, a writers own way of dening himself in relation to institutions,


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people and property; in short, his style of life and the experiences he willembark on in accordance with his vision of the world and of his own place

in it. Thus we can see the singularization of the work by the man and theuniversalization of the man by the work.60

In Sartres case the spectrum of his feasible work is circumscribed by thatall-encompassing quest for being we have already seen in the groping wordsof the student confronting man and nature, mind and existence, humanityand ideology, good and evil, death and determinism. Since the target is beingitself, conventional forms will not provide the ways of its unfolding; and sinceSartres works always aim at revealing being, or at indicating the roads towardsit, they must a priori exclude anything whatsoever to do with naturalism.Symbolism is also excluded as it would merely inate isolated chunks of thegiven immediacy into some abstract and static generality, instead of repro-ducing the dynamic multiplicity of relations which characterize the whole.What is called for, then, is some form of mediation capable of conveyingthe plenitude of being and the void of nothingness without falling intoabstract symbolism. He nds the mediation he needs in what he calls myth:

a condensation61 of traits of character (in line with the density or plenitudeof being) that elevates the perceived and depicted reality to the level of beingwithout abandoning the ground of sensibility. Thus condensation providesthe ground on which calculated indetermination and graphic individua-tion can ourish as truly creative principles.

We shall see in the next chapter the place of myth in Sartres work ingeneral. Here we are interested in its implications for our present context:

the range of works the author can successfully accomplish on such groundsin the framework of his totalizing quest. The rst is his novel cycle, Roads toFreedom. Considered not in isolation but in the totality of his development,Roads to Freedomis a failure in the sense of being a blind alley from whichthere can be no exit, no further explorations, no branching out, no roadsnot even a footpathto freedom. Despite its partial accomplishments,numerous and impressive though they may be, this work remains com-pletelyperipheralin Sartres lifework. He has to tear himself away from it, aslate as 1949, extricating himself form the consequences of a false choice, inorder to continue his quest in other directions. Ten years after abandoningwork on the fourth volume, he gives his reasons as follows:

The fourth volume was to speak of the Resistance. The choice was simplein those dayseven if one needed much strength and courage to stand byit. One was for or against the Germans. The choice was black or white.


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Todaysince 1945the situation is complicated. One needs less courage,perhaps, to choose, but the choices are much more difficult. I could not

express the ambiguities of our epoch in a novel situated in 1943.62

THESE ARE WHAT SARTRE CALLS elsewhere his internal difficulties63 forabandoning Roads to Freedom.

In reality the issue is much more complicated, for it is not only the fourthvolume which is problematical but the project as a whole. Reaching 1943means that things become more visible, at a point of climax, but they arethere from the beginning. The problematic character of the work manifestsitself structurally in a disturbing tension between straightforward every-dayness, depicted in its immediacy, and an abstract rhetoric which tries toproject everydayness onto the plane of universality.64In other words, it is themissing intermediary of myth or condensation that renders the workstructurally abstract and problematical in the framework of Sartres total-izing quest. The perception of a whole epoch within the parameters of anextremely simplied conict of black or white is in fact the consequence

of this abstract structure, rather than its massively objective causeas Sartrecuriously suggestsvery much out of character with his dialectical concep-tion of subject and object, author and work, cause and effect in literature.Examining the conditions under which Roads to Freedomwas written wend that Sartre allowed himself to be manoeuvred into the adoption of itsabstract structure, rst, by the scandal65 that followed the pervasive nega-tivity of his early short stories and Nausea, making him unwisely promise a

positive continuation,secondly (more understandable but artistically just asproblematic), by the abstract heroism66of his perception of the Resistancemovement in which he cannot assume more than a very peripheral role, nomatter how hard he tries. While it is true to say that his dramatic work as awhole is free from this structural abstractness, it would be quite wrong tosee as the reason for it simply that here we are concerned with a novelwithprose which aims at the totalization of a singular and ctive temporaliza-tion, as he had put it. It is the typeof prose which is in

Documents

MÉSZÁROS, István. The Work of Sartre